The story is usually in books from the perspective of the child, blogged about from the perspective of the parent of the disabled child. The anguish that parents feel as they struggle to find a way to help their children find a semblance of a normal life, to get them past the mental illnesses and issues that afflict them, the desperate efforts to intervene in the lives of grandchildren, often so far removed from what the grandparents can do.

In my own life I think of my mother's parents, certain that she had thrown our lives away by joining the LDS Church and not seeing sense and coming home. From my perspective, that was the greatest thing she could have done for me, to bring me to Christ. From their perspective, it was the worst.

The lines between mental illness and transcendence are sometimes hard to draw. As I struggle to help my children, to find what they need to see them safely home, I feel such sympathy for everyone in these stories, and for everyone in my own story, as mild as it might be.